The world's first commercial laptop—though that is certainly stretching the term—was the Osborne 1. When released in 1981, it cost $1,795, weighed 10.7kg (23.5lbs), and ran an operating system called CP/M. The 1983 Compaq Portable, which ran MS-DOS, was even larger (13kg) and cost $3,590. Neither had a battery, though an aftermarket battery for the Osborne 1 lasted an hour.

At the time, neither of these computers was actually called a "laptop;" they were portables that, in a pinch, could be lugged around. Famously, the Osborne 1 was advertised as being the first computer to fit under an airplane seat. Both the Osborne 1 and Compaq Portable were massively successful, raking in millions of dollars from users who realised that portable computing was about to alter the fabric of society and its ways of doing business forever.

We've come a long way since then.

Pick up your laptop. Actually, scratch that—read this paragraph first, then pick up your laptop. You are holding one of the most advanced machines ever built in the history of humanity. It is the result of trillions of hours of R&D over tens of thousands of years. It contains so many advanced components that there isn't a single person on the planet who knows how to make the entire thing from scratch. It is perhaps surprising to think of your laptop as the pinnacle of human endeavour, but that doesn't make it any less true: we are living in the information age, after all, and our tool for working with that information is the computer.

Enlarge/ The unibody chassis of the MacBook Pro, machined from a single piece of metal

Okay, you can put your laptop back down. Look at that dazzling display, with pixels so small that you can only see them if you get your nose right up against the glass. That unibody chassis, just a few millimetres thick, is remarkably rigid; really, try flexing it. Deep within, there's a single chip that has more processing power than a mid-'90s supercomputer that cost millions of dollars. You have enough ports and chips and antennas to provide gigabits of wired and wireless connectivity.

All of that, though, is nothing without a battery. Smartwatches, smartphones, tablets, laptops: they are all ultimately slaves of electricity. Without power, without a reliable surge of electrons, a device is nothing more than a pretty paperweight.

Don't stick a fork in me or I'll explode

Originally commercialised by Sony in 1991, lithium-ion batteries now power just about every consumer-oriented portable device. Some other battery chemistries exist for specialist and industrial applications, but lithium-ion is a great all-rounder. It has superb energy density, good power density, is light-weight, and some specific chemistries can be cycled thousands of times.

"Lithium-ion was the driving force that launched microelectronic portable devices," Peter H.L. Notten, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), told Ars in a telephone interview. Notten was at Philips Research between 1975 and 2010, where he worked on hydrogen storage materials, nickel-metal hydride (NiMH), and lithium-ion battery research. Today, he's working on a variety of different projects at TU/e and Forschungszentrum Jülich, including all-solid-state lithium-ion batteries.

24 years after those first lithium-ion batteries, though, and we're still using the same battery chemistry. Sure, numerous tweaks have been made along the way, giving us small boosts in energy density, but the underlying chemistry is still the same: there's a lithium-metal oxide positive electrode, a lithium salt electrolyte, and a carbon negative electrode.

"Roughly, you can state that the annual improvement [of battery energy density] is about 5 percent," Notten said. "That's a rule of thumb I always use.

"In principle you have some new chemistries coming up, such as lithium-sulphur, which is interesting because sulphur is a very cheap material—but [the researchers] still have to tackle quite a few problems," he added. "And at the far end you have lithium-air, which is a hybrid system between a battery and a fuel cell, where you use oxygen from the air. People are doing fundamental research [into lithium-air], but believe me it will not be on the market within 15-20 years from now... For now, we are stuck with lithium-ion batteries."

Solid-state batteries

Longer-term, it's hard to say what, if anything, might replace lithium-ion. Lithium is, on paper, about as good as it gets. Various teams around the world are working on exotic new forms of battery, but there is nothing that is particularly close to commercialisation. For the next few years at least, it's unlikely that anything will challenge Notten's five-percent rule of thumb. We shouldn't be disheartened, though. According to Notten, "many of the incremental improvements are based on fundamental steps."

For example, silicon is often cited as a replacement for carbon, which makes up almost all lithium-ion battery anodes. Silicon can suck up about 10 times as many lithium ions as carbon, which could allow for batteries with much higher energy density.

In practice, though, a much more incremental approach has to be taken. "For example, when you use pure silicon [as the anode material], it's not very practical, because the physical expansion is extremely high, it's about 300 to 400 volume percent," Notten explained. "So, right now, the strategy is to improve the capacity of [the carbon anode] by mixing in tiny amounts of silicon. From the outside that looks like an incremental step, but fundamentally it's a big step. And that holds for most of the proposed changes in lithium-ion cells today."

Enlarge/ A diagram of a 3D all-solid-state lithium-ion battery, from one of Notten's research papers.

10 or 15 years from now, Notten thinks we might begin to see lithium-sulphur batteries, or perhaps lithium-air. "But there's another final step that people are now considering," he said. "If you could make the electrolyte very thin, and if you could make it solid-state, then there's a real leap to make in energy density as well. Solid-state lithium-ion batteries... some people think this is the end-game of batteries." Notten's team has been working on solid-state batteries for the last 10 years or so, and it sounds like there's still a lot of work left to do.

What about the other battery "breakthroughs" that have been published in recent years?

"You have to distinguish between fancy scientific research and the application of these materials in real batteries," Notten said. "Frankly speaking, if people are publishing a lot of nanowire research, the translation to real batteries is in general very poor... You have to take care of all the parameters and boundary conditions, and not select a single one, which is what some research groups are doing."

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Sebastian Anthony
Sebastian is the editor of Ars Technica UK. He usually writes about low-level hardware, software, and transport, but it is emerging science and the future of technology that really get him excited. Emailsebastian@arstechnica.co.uk//Twitter@mrseb

there isn't a single person on the planet who knows how to make the entire thing from scratch.

There's not even a single COMPANY which knows how to make the entire thing from scratch.

If all technology on this planet were to disappear instantaneously (with everything we know about it being recorded in books), I wonder how many years it would take to actually be able to re-create my laptop. I mean, countless computers were used to make this computer. And computers were used to make the computers that made this computer. And so on. We can't just go and build a modern CPU fab plant out of nothing.

Intersting article but the title a bit misleading - it would make sense to split it intwo two - a more in depth article on battery technology and its chemical limits and a second one on the advances of the portable form factor, ideally peeking into the possible futures a bit more?I'd love to see follow-up articles from this:1. In depth on battery tech2. Future form factors, wearables, new i/o methods etc..

Intersting article but the title a bit misleading - it would make sense to split it intwo two - a more in depth article on battery technology and its chemical limits and a second one on the advances of the portable form factor, ideally peeking into the possible futures a bit more?I'd love to see follow-up articles from this:1. In depth on battery tech2. Future form factors, wearables, new i/o methods etc..

Yeah, we could definitely dive a bit deeper into specific areas. I have a few battery-related stories on my to-do list that I'd love to get stuck into -- perhaps a deep-dive, or a series of posts about the future of battery tech.

there isn't a single person on the planet who knows how to make the entire thing from scratch.

There's not even a single COMPANY which knows how to make the entire thing from scratch.

If all technology on this planet were to disappear instantaneously (with everything we know about it being recorded in books), I wonder how many years it would take to actually be able to re-create my laptop. I mean, countless computers were used to make this computer. And computers were used to make the computers that made this computer. And so on. We can't just go and build a modern CPU fab plant out of nothing.

Probably hundreds if not thousands of years. Human civilisation would collapse, and we'd return to an age of superstition and fighting as resources run low. Once a large percentage of the population has starved to death or died from diseases, the survivors can begin formulating procedures for dealing with witches. We'd then have to hope that the genius minds who enable the big leaps can write down their ideas before being flung in to the inquisitor's fire. Pretty much Mad Max, minus the cars and weapons.

*Sigh*Don't take this personally but every time the fact that computers use magnesium chassis pops out the supposed flammability of it is brought up:Pure magnesium isn't especially flammable even among metals, to ignite a block of it requires some effort. We aren't talking about thin ribbons here. The alloys used for computers are much harder to ignite than pure magnesium as it includes retardants. It is also protected by paint.

*Sigh*Don't take this personally but every time the fact that computers use magnesium chassis pops out the supposed flammability of it is brought up:Pure magnesium isn't especially flammable even among metals, to ignite a block of it requires some effort. We aren't talking about thin ribbons here. The alloys used for computers are much harder to ignite than pure magnesium as it includes retardants. It is also protected by paint.

*Sigh*Don't take this personally but every time the fact that computers use magnesium chassis pops out the supposed flammability of it is brought up:Pure magnesium isn't especially flammable even among metals, to ignite a block of it requires some effort. We aren't talking about thin ribbons here. The alloys used for computers are much harder to ignite than pure magnesium as it includes retardants. It is also protected by paint.

You are holding one of the most advanced machines ever built in the history of humanity. It is the result of trillions of hours of R&D over tens of thousands of years.

Yet in the time it takes for this machine to arrive from the factory to your desk it is already obsolete Computers have only been around for half a century, and are still developing at an amazing pace. What we have now is still only scratching the surface of what's possible in computing.

My dell insprion 1749 has an i7-5500u, 8gb ram, Nvidia Geforce 840m graphics and a 1tb harddrave and it only cost me £550.

This for a machine that can run basically everything (ok maybe not witcher 3 or crysis 3 at high but hey)

And further down the scale, you have computers reaching below £200, and they aren't half bad either. I'd say performance-wise most people would be happy with them. They can web browse, run office and all the other basics.

And then you have tablets fighting it out in the £59-£150 bracket.

The most expensive part is becoming the actual data connection and even then in most countries there are free wi-fi hotspots.

You are holding one of the most advanced machines ever built in the history of humanity. It is the result of trillions of hours of R&D over tens of thousands of years.

Yet in the time it takes for this machine to arrive from the factory to your desk it is already obsolete Computers have only been around for half a century, and are still developing at an amazing pace. What we have now is still only scratching the surface of what's possible in computing.

Too true, I bought my laptop, knowing that it wasn't the best and would be outclassed in the price range within six months. It does bug me a tiny tiny bit, but all it means is that in a decade the next laptop will be amazing at the price,

*Sigh*Don't take this personally but every time the fact that computers use magnesium chassis pops out the supposed flammability of it is brought up:Pure magnesium isn't especially flammable even among metals, to ignite a block of it requires some effort. We aren't talking about thin ribbons here. The alloys used for computers are much harder to ignite than pure magnesium as it includes retardants. It is also protected by paint.

And aluminium is very reactive too, when not protected by its native oxide. We had a trouble in a factory where we had garbage bin fire until we realized the excess aluminium removed from a vacuum evaporator was layered and not oxidized, and was heating up to ignition onto contact with air.

there isn't a single person on the planet who knows how to make the entire thing from scratch.

There's not even a single COMPANY which knows how to make the entire thing from scratch.

If all technology on this planet were to disappear instantaneously (with everything we know about it being recorded in books), I wonder how many years it would take to actually be able to re-create my laptop. I mean, countless computers were used to make this computer. And computers were used to make the computers that made this computer. And so on. We can't just go and build a modern CPU fab plant out of nothing.

I think Samsung (with all their different subdivisions, though these are different companies then) would be able to make one from scratch.

*Sigh*Don't take this personally but every time the fact that computers use magnesium chassis pops out the supposed flammability of it is brought up:Pure magnesium isn't especially flammable even among metals, to ignite a block of it requires some effort. We aren't talking about thin ribbons here. The alloys used for computers are much harder to ignite than pure magnesium as it includes retardants. It is also protected by paint.

And aluminium is very reactive too, when not protected by its native oxide. We had a trouble in a factory where we had garbage bin fire until we realized the excess aluminium removed from a vacuum evaporator was layered and not oxidized, and was heating up to ignition onto contact with air.

There have been a few high-profile explosions in Chinese manufacturing facilities, due to aluminium dust:

there isn't a single person on the planet who knows how to make the entire thing from scratch.

There's not even a single COMPANY which knows how to make the entire thing from scratch.

If all technology on this planet were to disappear instantaneously (with everything we know about it being recorded in books), I wonder how many years it would take to actually be able to re-create my laptop. I mean, countless computers were used to make this computer. And computers were used to make the computers that made this computer. And so on. We can't just go and build a modern CPU fab plant out of nothing.

Probably hundreds if not thousands of years. Human civilisation would collapse, and we'd return to an age of superstition and fighting as resources run low. Once a large percentage of the population has starved to death or died from diseases, the survivors can begin formulating procedures for dealing with witches.

In fairness, if all technology just magically disappeared instantaneously, I'd be pretty inclined to do an about-face, and considering some sort of divine spaghetti-monster-higher-power Save me Jeebuz!

The author should note that the second generation of Apple laptops circa 1995 were poor specimens: they were expensive, crashed, and had poor plastics. Apple had a strong hold on the laptop market up 'til then, but its lack of attention to product quality almost single-handedly gave the market to Dell.

It's also worth noting the PowerBook 5300 had one of the first lithium-ion batteries, but due to safety issues, shipped with NiMH batteries.

The G3 series and later have been excellent, but the damage was done, and it's been a very slow claw-back since.

This should be a cautionary tale for anyone who takes their market for granted and chooses to insert poor quality into the channel.

It is perhaps surprising to think of your laptop as the pinnacle of human endeavour, but that doesn't make it any less true: we are living in the information age, after all, and our tool for working with that information is the computer.

is technocratic bullshit and a surprising amount of presentism. Completely ignoring the sheer amount of other achievements throughout human history, it perpetuates this notion that history has peaked in everything we do rather than the far more meandering route it has taken; if there even is a linear progression of technology. Le sigh.

Signed,A student of history

I have to agree. The various space programs are far more pinnacle status vs the laptop, which is a part of that pinnacle effort.

I remember that I had a 386 laptop with something like a 4 inch screen scrounged from the university discard pile from the CompSci department that had a clamshell hinge in the middle of the body rather at the edge.

"In principle you have some new chemistries coming up, such as lithium-sulphur, which is interesting because sulphur is a very cheap material—but [the researchers] still have to tackle quite a few problems," he added. "And at the far end you have lithium-air, which is a hybrid system between a battery and a fuel cell, where you use oxygen from the air. People are doing fundamental research [into lithium-air], but believe me it will not be on the market within 15-20 years from now... For now, we are stuck with lithium-ion batteries."

Didn't Ars cover a fuel-cell using butane?

Quote:

A die shot of the Intel 80186 CPU

Imagine laying that out in a game engine, and walking through it? Big would be an understatement.

Quote:

There's more to modern manufacturing than just the design and prototyping stages, however. The production line, where the product is finally mass produced, is also incredibly important. Companies like Apple, Dell, Microsoft, have all made major investments in production lines in countries where unskilled labour is still relatively cheap, such as China and Thailand. As industrial designers concoct increasingly complex designs, and ever more exotic materials are incorporated into products, these production lines need to be outfitted with specialised tooling and equipment

The tooling gets more complicated, while the labor stays the same. Quite the commentary.

BTW I see cellphones not laptops as examples of the ultimate integration of analog and digital.

Battery technology, then, isn't going anywhere fast: you get about five percent more energy density per year, some slight tweaks for power density depending on the exact chemistry used, and that's about it.

Microfabrication, however—or semiconductor manufacturing, as it's more commonly known—is a completely different beast. Where battery gains have been mostly linear for the last 25 years, semiconductor companies have just about managed to stick to the exponential curve of Moore's self-fulfilling prophecy.

Five percent per year is exponential growth, basically by definition. Sure, it's slower than Moore's law, but still exponential with all its properties (including that if it continues, it will eventually overtake any linear growth).

"Roughly, you can state that the annual improvement [of battery energy density] is about 5 percent," Notten said.

Based on what I've seen over the years with regards to improvements to Tesla's car batteries, the annual improvement seems to be about 3%. At 5% we'd see a complete doubling of energy density in 14 years.

"Surface Pro 3 was the first device that we fully CNC machined from a block of magnesium," Groene said. "Not because it's super cool, but because we can pack many more iteration cycles into the product cycle. If you tool stuff in plastic, then you can have 10-week chunks of time where you cannot innovate."

I'm confused by why plastic causes a 10-week waiting time, but magnesium doesn't. Is it implied that by first tooling the chassis in plastic and then later converting it to magnesium requires a 10-week gap?

*Sigh*Don't take this personally but every time the fact that computers use magnesium chassis pops out the supposed flammability of it is brought up:Pure magnesium isn't especially flammable even among metals, to ignite a block of it requires some effort. We aren't talking about thin ribbons here. The alloys used for computers are much harder to ignite than pure magnesium as it includes retardants. It is also protected by paint.

Unless it is a magnesium gear-box cover for your motorcycle. And you try to fill-weld a crack, like a friend of my father's did. Fortunately he took it off the bike before he tried.

Anyway, I've got an Osborne 1 that somebody gave me back in the mid-90s. I've fired it up a couple of times, but I don't remember how to use CP/M.

I always liked the TrackPoint thingie, much better than trackpads. I don't know why the pads are so popular.

"If you tool stuff in plastic, then you can have 10-week chunks of time where you cannot innovate."

I'm confused by why plastic causes a 10-week waiting time, but magnesium doesn't. Is it implied that by first tooling the chassis in plastic and then later converting it to magnesium requires a 10-week gap?

This took me a couple of passes as well. "If you tool stuff in" can be read as "If you make the case from".

A case of plastic requires a tool and die round of effort, based on the model, to get the production line ready to mold your case.

A case of magnesium alloy only requires that you change the numbers going to the CNC machines, and the very next case off the line in a few minutes will be your new case.